Traditionally there are two methods of enterprise management solutions to gather application information. The first is by analyzing network traffic that is associated between two or more nodes on a given enterprise network. This method creates ambiguity when determining what applications on the nodes are actually creating the traffic as well as difficulty in determining when a change has accrued. The second is by polling the Application Interface of the operating system to determine what applications are installed and have the potential of executing on the nodes.
In both cases, these methods do not allow for the variations of custom applications that are utilized by enterprise networks. For example these traditional methods may determine if a commonly used application is present but have no ability to determine if custom applications such as those created for a specific business process (banking, defense, healthcare, and industrial automated systems) are being executed.
The methods to determine that configuration changes have occurred are fairly uniform. Typically, a list is created and referenced when new information is gathered.
Once a list of the changes in application and configuration are created, they are typically used only for reporting purposes. They do not correlate the changes in the performance of the given node to the change in application or system configuration of the node.